Theater Talk

May 30, 2013

On Broadway, musicals may dominate but for serious theategoers, the play’s still the thing.While the most popular musicals can run for years or even decades, even the most acclaimed plays usually only run for months, perhaps a season at the most.Yet, several recent Broadway plays deserve to be seen widely, from The Assembled Parties to Peter and the Starcatcher.Theater lovers who plan to visit New York usually have to act soon, since these days the run of a Broadway play is more like the life of a firefly in a garden. Blink and you might miss it.That means that most central Ohio residents most likely will have to wait for area theaters to win the rights to stage the new plays and mount them with local actors, directors and designers.The good news: That’s very likely to occur with the plays mentioned above – as well as with Christopher Durang’s hilarious and moving Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (which I reviewed in a Theater Talk blog last month during my annual New York theater trip and which I’ll be writing more about for my June 9 Sunday Arts column about the overall Broadway season and that night’s Tony awards).

Jessica Hecht as Julie, left to right, Jeremy Shamos as Jeff and Judith Light as Faye in the Broadway production of The Assembled Parties. Credit: Joan Marcus

The Assembled Parties – Richard Greenberg’s wistful family drama, in a limited Manhattan Theatre Club run through July 7 at New York’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, explores the devastating consequences of secrets and lies over two generations.But you wouldn’t guess that from the deceptive first act.Set in 1980 in an impossibly large and tastefully appointed Manhattan apartment where an assimilated Jewish family gathers with relatives and a new young friend to celebrate Christmas – yes, that gentile holiday – over dinner, the first act mostly comes across as a witty and charming comedy-drama.The central issue seems to be vaguely about relationships, or perhaps how cultural assimilation or class shapes modern America. I wasn’t really sure when I saw a performance last month during my annual Dispatch theater trip to New York, but I mostly didn’t care.Instead, I was mostly captivated by Greenberg’s intelligent dialogue and the charming performances – especially by Jessica Hecht as the sunny hostess Julie, a former movie star; Judith Light as the sister-in-law unafraid to speak up and speak out; and Jeremy Shamos (as the wide-eyed college classmate of the family’s mostly absent son. It is through Shamos’ character that we really enter the play, feeling his feelings above all as he is charmed and warmed by Julie and idealistically wowed by the family’s style, affluence and hospitality.By the intermission, though, I was seriously wondering what this play was really about – and also beginning to wonder whether I cared.The second act, set in 2000 in the same 14-room apartment (but now somewhat shabbier) on Manhattan’s Upper West side, provides the delayed payoff.And what dramatic power it has – but it wouldn’t be fair to give away almost any of this play’s secrets and considerable payoffs.Suffice to say that the play makes you think about what really matters in life and what illusions your own family might be carrying around like an unnecessary weight from the distant past.Greenberg writes such elliptical drama, laced with humor and chatter and later with pathos and unspoken regret, that not until nearly the end of the two-act play does its cumulative emotional power build and finally overwhelm.That makes this work very difficult to stage and cast, although otherwise The Assembled Parties is exactly the type of modern Jewish-themed play that seems destined for a central Ohio premiere at the Jewish Community Center’s Gallery Players.Greenberg, best known for his Tony-winning baseball coming-out drama Take Me Out, is an inventive and restless playwright who experiments with many different types of plays from contemporary relationship dramas (Three Days of Rain, a Pulitzer finalist) to screwball comedy (Eastern Standard) to quirky alternative-history drama (The Violet Hour) to iconic reinterpretations of classics (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which received mixed reviews in its shortened spring Broadway run despite acclaim for Otterbein University grad Cory Michael Smith as Holly Golightly’s boyfriend-narrator).Not all of Greenberg’s experiments work, and I found Take Me Out and Eastern Standard more satisfying and complete throughout, but The Assembled Parties finally redeems itself.

Kevin Del Aguila, left to right, and Rick Holes in the off-Broadway production of Peter and the Starcatcher. Credit: Jenny Anderson

Peter and the Starcatcher – For sheer theatricality and self-referential wit, this canny and uplifting prequel to Peter Pan can’t be beat.Creatively adapted by Rick Elice (Jersey Boys, The Addams Family) from Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson’s novel, the brisk one-act races through shipwrecks, fights, chases, songs, spectacle, slapstick, word play and exuberant adventure.Like The 39 Steps,Shipwrecked (which CATCO will stage next season) and Around the World in 80 Days, which will receive its world premiere in June at Newark’s Weathervane Playhouse, Peter falls into the giddy minimalist mode of imaginative and clever "story theater."It’s one of my favorite styles of play-crafting because it shows off what theater can do best: enlist the audience’s imagination in telling a good story.After opening to mostly rave reviews off-Broadway in 2011 and moving in 2012 to Broadway, Starcatcher was nominated for nine Tony awards including best play and won five – including best sound, costumes, scenery and lighting design. The production, which closed in January on Broadway after a respectable 300-plus performances, recently transferred back to an off-Broadway run at New World Stages, where it benefits from the greater intimacy of a smaller stage.By the end of this adventurous comedy-fantasy, you’ll find out how Peter Pan became Peter Pan, how the Lost Boys got lost, how Captain Hook got hooked and what makes Neverland so magical, anyway.

IF YOU GO The Assembled Parties continues through July 7 at New York’s Samuel J. Firedman Theatre, 261 W. 47 th St. For tickets, call Telecharge at 800-447-7400 212-239-6200 or visit www.Telecharge.comPeter and the Starcatcher continues in an open run at New York’s new World Stages, 340 W. 50 th St. For tickets, call Telecharge.